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New book by Jeffries and Walker

Lesley Jeffries' and Brian Walker's new book, Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in November this year. The book is part of the Research in Corpus and Discourse series and early reviews are excellent!

“Keywords in the Press examines a crucial time in British political history through the lens of the keywords used in that era. It demonstrates how a focus on language can inform political critique, by questioning and unravelling what other commentators overlook. The authors have performed an important service by making the research process itself crystal clear and so available for other researchers to apply.” Susan Hunston, Professor of English Language, University of Birmingham, UK

“This book is an example par excellence of what critical applications of linguistics can and should do for social science research. Perfectly mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, the book combines keyword analysis with critical stylistics, an approach developed by the authors, to illuminate the core values characterising New Labour. Clear, engaging and rigorous, the book offers a valuable, language-based framework for investigating political ideologies. As such, it will appeal to those working in critical language studies but equally students and researchers in political science with a concern for the linguistic reflexes of politics in action.” Christopher Hart, Professor of Linguistics, Lancaster University, UK

“Keywords in the Press is a significant spin-free contribution to studies of neo-liberal influenced political buzzwords. This analysis of semantically empty but ominously dominant keywords such as 'choice', 'terror' and 'reform' updates Raymond Williams classic study. Supported by an impressive 30 million word news corpus and combined with a critical stylistic framework this is a welcome and overdue empirical study of the enduring legacy of Blair's New Labour discourse.” Matt Davies, Senior Lecturer in English Language, University of Chester, UK